Hundreds Of Thousands Of Maricopa County Residents Vote Early In Primary

The Maricopa County Elections Department is at work counting the early ballots received for Tuesday's primary. They're also getting ready for in-person voting, even though not many people are expected to show up.

The Secretary of State's office projects voter turnout of around 25 percent for the primary, which includes both early and in-person ballots. Maricopa County had received 369,000 early ballots as of mid-day Monday, which is nearly 20 percent of the county's registered voters and about what county officials expected at this point.County Recorder Helen Purcell said workers started counting ballots last week.

"Last night, we had counted 255,000 and I'm assuming that they'll do another 50,000 to 60,000 (today), so we will have probably over 300,000 that will be reported at 8 o'clock (Tuesday) night," Purcell said.

And with the possibility of heavy rain tomorrow, Purcell said if there's flooding or a power outage, her team can relocate a polling place quickly, "and have had to do that on several occasions. One year we had a microburst at one of the polling places that affected them and we had to move it at the last minute, but we do that very quickly and we put signs at the old polling place directing (voters) to a new one."

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